Sponge Project Blog

Part 2 of the Websites for Members of Parliament (MPs) series takes us to Geoffrey Clifton-Brown’s website.

Design

The overall design of this site is clean, simple and quite pleasant using a of palette light and dark green set against white background with grey text for headings. Use of images is minimal but used to good effect including the Conservatives and the Houses of Commons logos in the header. Dig deeper into the site and the good use of images continues with carefully chosen and relevant pictures to help illustrate the content. The Cotswolds page is a favourite. Even with images turned off, the site still works, with all the key content, such as navigation, header and links, displayed as text.

I can’t find much wrong with the design overall as it’s very conservative (no pun intended) and average. It does have a whiff of template about it and in fact looks very similar to other sites provided by the company that supports it.

However the technical design leaves a lot to be desired. The code used to build the site, whilst vaguely semantic, is invalid meaning cross-browser issues abound. By writing valid code you end up with pages that render better, render on more browsers, and render faster than HTML with errors. Essentially this is all about quality. It also helps lower maintenance costs of the site, although I suspect this is built using a CMS so this argument is potentially irrelevant.

That said the reasons it’s all invalid code is probably the CMS itself. The code is a complete mess! There’s no doctype, no parse mode statements and nearly 50 coding errors. This coming from a company that specialises in providing websites for MPs is quite worrying.

Engagement

The tone of the site is confident and reassuring, which probably reflects Geoffrey’s own personality - I’ve never met him so can only guess. A good news section doesn’t overload the reader and comes with helpful features such as search, RSS feeds and browse by topic or date links, something many commercial sites lack.

Although there are traces of audio and video on the site they’re embedded as links within the content so you are forced to download and view or listen to them in an external media player. It would have been nice, particularly in this day and age, to provide in-page or streamed content so the user doesn’t have to leave the browser.

Accessibility

Overall the accessibility is OK. The option to view a text only version of the site is welcome, but potentially unnecessary. As discussed before the technical design of the website will cause some users problems. Simply sorting out the code so the pages would validate will go a long way to removes these issues.

Summary

The user experience starts out well with strong, relevant content and useful website features, but the technical issues and the lack of overall quality let things down. So I’ll give Geoffrey Clifton-Brown’s website 3 out of 5 stars.

As a favour to the headmaster at my boy’s primary school, I took on some work to design and build a new website for them. The result is Tirlebrook Primary School:

The key need for them was a simple and easy to use back end, so I chose the ‘ol faithful Wordpress. I heavily customised Chris Peasons’s Cutline theme and modified the admin system to meet their needs. There’s a few plugins installed, namely:

• Quotes Collection - use this for the random “What people say” section in the sidebar
• Wordpress Ready Contact Form - another favourite for the “Contact us” page
• Google Sitemap Generator Plugin - great little plugin to generate search engine friendly sitemaps
• Add Alt - to help keep the code valid
• BackUpWordpress - does what it says on the tin and very well I might add

If you want me to build you a website, just drop me a line and we can discuss.

Part 1 of the Websites for Members of Parliament (MPs) series see us visiting Martin Horwood’s website, Liberal Democrat MP for Cheltenham.

Design

Overall the site is pleasant and well laid out with a bold colour scheme of yellow and black, which matches the party colours. The layout is familiar to most users with a navigation bar at the top and main content in the middle. The nice friendly image of Martin superimposed on the Devil’s chimney gives the site a welcoming and friendly feeling. There’s nothing to set the world alight from a design perspective, but it remains functional.

However there are a few niggling issues which mark it down. The navigation, which although straight forward, is a bit small and could easily be missed. Also it was built using images, which given that each image is the name of the link render in Arial or similar font, there’s really no need to use images at all. Also it would have been nice to also use more visual guidance for when the user hovers over the navigation items or to indicate the currently active page. Similarly the use of the standard blue colour for links in the main content lets the side down. It would have been nice to see something more in keeping with the overall site aesthetic.

On the plus side however there is an attempt at constructing the web pages correctly by divorcing content from presentation. In other words the HTML used to build the page structure and house the content is held in a separate file to the CSS used for presentation. This shows some attention to detail and a nod to web standards, but disappointingly is a half-hearted attempt.

Engagement

The biggest thing going for is the amount of content supplied, particularly Martin’s news section. A lot of care is taken to publish relevant and timely news articles, which help the visitor get to know more about Martin and the Lib Dem’s policies and views, particularly for local issues. It can seem a bit overbearing as there’s no published date so you have to assume reverse chronological order and also no ability list by date or topic, however the search function does come in handy. Also an RSS feed would really add value here.

There’s also a series of videos for the more interactive users amongst us, which is encouraging and shows an eye on the current and future needs of site visitors.

The contact form is good, capturing only the necessary information, but also supplies more traditional means of communication with Martin such as phone or postal address.

Accessibility

The accessibility of the site is quite poor mainly due to a lack of attention to technical detail which means some users will experience difficulties.

For example the site does not validate as HTML as no doctype declaration is supplied! Without a doctype declaration the web browser doesn’t know what language to use, resulting in rendering issues meaning that anyone using anything but Internet Explorer get a less than satisfactory experience.

Not only that but the site is mainly a table based layout, which is bad. As the W3C says:

HTML is a structural language, which means it is - or should be - used to add structure into a text through tags. The table tag should then only be used to format data into a table to relate columns with rows.

In other words use tables to display tabular data, not for layout.

Also the use of the marquee element is just plain wrong. Not only is it deprecated, it’s know to cause problems for users with visual impairments or difficulties tracking moving text. Browser support is patchy at best, so there’s no guarantee it’ll work for everyone.

The page title doesn’t convey much other than the websites address, in this case “http://www.cheltlibdems.co.uk/”. Used correctly this element can help users understand more about the site, particularly ones using screen readers, but also improve search engine rankings. Perhaps a better one could read “Martin Horwood - Liberal Democrat MP for Cheltenham”.

The biggest boo-boo to my mind is the complete reliance on images for navigation. If you have images switched off, particularly ones using a text-base web browser, the site becomes completely unnavigable. I don’t know where I am or where I can go!

Summary

A good site with lots of relevant content and links will keep most users happy. However the lack of attention to technical detail will impede some users, disabled or otherwise, ability to successfully navigate the site. Because of this I can only give Martin Horwood’s site 2 our of 5 stars.

The British Computer Society (BCS) is running a competition for the Best MP website. So with this in mind I thought I’d do some browsing to check the quality of MP websites here in Gloucestershire. Over the coming weeks I’ll run a series of short articles summarising my findings. These aren’t personal slurs or criticisms, just genuine constructive feedback.

Design, engagement and accessibility

Using the BCS’ three judging categories of design, engagement and accessibility, I’ve run a series or tests for the MPs for Gloucestershire:

• Martin Harwood Lib Dem for Cheltenham
• Geoffrey Clifton-Brown Conservative for the Cotswolds
• Mark Harper Conservative for the Forest of Dean
• Parmjit Dhanda Labour for Gloucester
• David Elliot Drew Labour for Stroud
• Laurence Robertson Conservative for Tewkesbury (my local MP)

Last year’s winners

As a comparison here’s last year’s winners to show what the BCS think constitutes a good website. I must say they got it spot on with Derek Wyatt’s site. Good looking, detailed, easy to use and even has it’s own sub-site dedicated to videos of Derek’s appearances in Parliament and around his constituency.

Watch this pace

So keep you eyes peeled for the results of my findings over the next few weeks.

Inspired by Stephen’s post.

So I’ve had enough of the design contests for now and of the 4 contests I entered I averaged 2 stars, which is pants. I think this boils down to the lack of time and not being able to give enough polish and detail to each contest. Anyway, I won’t give up and will keep plugging away.